


The Abyss

by FilmFreak94



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 17:14:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5710519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FilmFreak94/pseuds/FilmFreak94
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How the leader of the royal guard and the royal scientist met (or at least my take on it).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Abyss

_Do you remember how we met?_

She’d been here plenty of times before. When it wasn’t for the purpose of digging around for spare scrap metal or trying desperately to find the second season of her favorite anime, she mostly came down here to clear her mind, to be where she felt the most at home. The garbage dump.

She practically grew up in this dump, hanging out with some of the neighborhood kids, showing them the best of the garbage humanity had deemed fit to throw down into the underground. She didn’t know much about humanity, apart from the general history taught at school, but they had impeccable taste in animated TV shows at least. She’d found everything that made her her in the recesses of this wasteland. The smell, putrid to some, was one of the only things that soothed her nerves, and they were plenty. The rush of the waterfall gave the dump a calming echo, bouncing all across the walls in a sort of tuneless song. It was a second home to her, a sanctuary.

But no sanctuary would bring her solace this day. No rushing water or mounds of garbage with hidden magical girls and giant sword-wielders could clear her mind. Too much had happened in recent memory for her nerves to be sated so easily. First came the death of the King’s children, one after the other, and his frantic pleading with her to find some way to bring them back, any way she could. The experiments in the lab, once promising and beacons of hope for the future of their kind, were now twisted shells of their former selves, mutated into horrible states by her own hubris. She’d created many demons, but none worse than herself.

There was little hope left in the underground after that. The things in the true lab were not ready to return to their homes and families, nor would they ever be, the King was left without his children and eventually his wife followed, leaving him when he had declared a new war against the humans. Seven souls was all it would take, seven more would have to die for her own mistakes. For there was no one she blamed more for what had happened than herself. If she had been smarter, braver even, the experiments would be a success. The amalgamates would be able to return home, live a new life with their families and have as strong a soul as a monster’s and a human’s combined. The King would have his children back, his wife would not have gone into self-imposed exile, Home would not be in the dire state it was now. She could see it in the faces of many a monster, they had lost all hope, scourged by all that had happened on such a short time. There was a gleam of it left when Asgore had announced a new war, but the flames inside them would never be as bright as they had been before. And she was responsible for it. All of it.

The bottom of her lab coat was drenched in the murky water of the dump, spoiled from all the trash mounded upon it. It felt cold on her feet, not a terrible cold but still colder than she could ever get used to at first. The tip of her tail swayed on the surface back and forth, slow and without any purpose. She passed a few huge piles where she’d gotten her first few DVDs, followed by her first DVD player, then her first TV, a camera she’d given to the King, and a few other cameras she’d kept for herself. There was a cooler filled with strange food that she ate only once out of curiosity and never again. And soon the rush of the waterfall became louder as she turned a corner and onto the platform that floated between the bottom of the waterfall and the abyss far below it.

Bits of trash that didn’t clump together found their way to the abyss, falling maybe ten thousand feet or ten feet to the unknown. It was impossible to tell how deep it actually went, and she’d always hypothesized ways she could measure it, find the bottom and see what was down there. She even thought of setting up a net so that she could catch some of the garbage and sort it out to see if there was anything useful or entertaining (at least to her). But as she stood on the platform, eyes red with exhaustion and more than a few tears, she thought of another hypothesis concerning the abyss. Where would it take her, how did it really go, would it happen in an instant or would she feel it first? And what would happen after that? Would anyone miss her after she was gone, or would they never even notice? Would they give a half-hearted, “oh, what a shame,” or whisper under the breaths, “good riddance.” She wouldn’t blame them.

She gave a deep sigh as she closed her eyes, listening to the water behind her, the distant echo of her childhood exploits hidden underneath the echo, the memories of happier times hidden deeper than that like a phantom in the walls. Had they really been happier times? Had she ever truly been happy? Had others truly been happy around her? It didn’t matter now, she was through feeling sorry for herself. All her tears had been spent and all the emotion inside her had dried up. There was nothing now except to find out once and for all what awaited her in the abyss. To embrace the silence of the darkness…

  
“Nice echo, huh?” She opened her eyes with a start and did the only thing she could. Yell.

“AAAAAAH!!!”

“AAAAAAH!!!”

“AAAAAAH!!!”

“AAAAAAH!!!”

“AAAAAAH!!!”

“AAAAAAH!!!”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-”

And so it went. For a good minute she screamed, joined by the intruder who was just as surprised as she was. When all the breath had left her she began to pant in relief, unable to say anything at first even as the intruder spoke.

“Sorry! Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you, I was just… well I was uh… I was… what are you doing here?!” The intruder suddenly shouted which caused her to jump again.

“M-me? I was uh… j-just, nothing really, just… I… uhm…”

“You weren’t up to anything suspicious were you?” The intruder stepped cautiously towards her, their eyes beady and untrusting. They intimidated her, not exactly a hard thing to do but they were especially difficult to look at for too long.

“N-no! No, no, nonononononono, no no, uh-uh, no way. Nothing suspicious, I uhm… I…”

“Well?” The intruder folded their arms.

“I… like to come here?” She finally managed to say. The intruder raised an eyebrow, saying nothing as they stared at each other.

“You too?” The relief that coursed through her was the best she had felt in a long time.

“Y-yeah. I mean, you like to come here… too?” The intruder’s stolid face broke into an impish grin.

“Yeah!” She leaped a good few feet into the air and landed hard on the platform, rocking them both a bit. “It’s relaxing!!!” Her voice was louder than the waterfall, drowning it out as ‘it’s relaxing’ reverberated all throughout the dump. 

“I-I-I think so too, hehe…” She gulped. Something about this strange monster still intimidated her, they were much taller with razor sharp teeth for one, but at the same time there was something about them that seemed eager to comfort her. 

“I just like to come down here and rub myself in some nice dirt every now and again. Does wonders for the pores.” They kept grinning. She would make a guess that ‘they’ were a ‘she,’ solely based on what they were wearing. Simple blue jeans with red boots and a black shirt that pronounced some more feminine features in her chest area. Not that she was looking at her chest area…

“I c-come down here to look through the… ahem, the trash.” She admitted.

“Neat.” They just would not quit smiling, it was starting to get infectious. “I do too.”

“You do?”

“Sure! Mostly for cool swords.”

“S-swords?”

“Yeah! Big ass swords! The kind that can cut a head clean off! Y’know?” She nodded a bit nervously. “The only thing that kind of bugs me about this place is that.” She bobbed her head a little to the left.

“What?”

“That.” The intruder bobbed her head again but she still couldn’t tell what she was talking about. “That!” She pointed down at the abyss this time.

“Ooooooh, that!” She let out a nervous chuckle, wanting nothing more than to get out of here and run safely back to the comfort of her lab in Hotland. “W-what don’t you like about it?” She asked instead.

“I dunno,” the intruder answered, “there’s just something about it I don’t like. I can read monsters easy, I know good ones from ones that need a kick in the pants.” After looking at how worn out here boots were she could imagine she had given many a monster a well-deserved butt kicking. “But there’s something about that… pit thing that makes me nervous.”

“It kind of makes me nervous too…” She jumped a little when the intruder looked at her again. She only nodded as they both went back to staring into the abyss.

“It’s just so… black and… empty looking.”

“Yeah…”

“All sorts of garbage gets thrown in there all the time, even my neighbors take some of their stuff here to throw it over the edge. They don’t mind it, I guess they wouldn’t, but I’m always thinking someone’s gonna fall in there.” She gulped.

“Y-yeah. That would be…” She couldn’t finish her sentence, her eyes sullen once more as she thought of what she was going to do before she had been interrupted. “I… though about setting up a net here once.”

“Ya did?” The intruder asked.

“Y-yeah, just to catch some extra garbage mostly, b-but, it could help make sure no one falls in too?” 

“That’s a great idea!” The intruder’s smile was too much and she could feel a smile of her own perking on the side of her lips. “I could have my neighbors set it up. They wouldn’t fall in, they can float!” 

“G-great!?”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

“YEAH!!!” Her voice echoed again as she reached out her arm and slapped the back of her shoulder. She grimaced, laughing a bit to try and shake off the pain. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to-”

“N-no, I’m fine, ow, I’ll be fine.” She rubbed her shoulder. “You’re pretty strong…” The intruder giggled as she smiled.

“Thanks, I work out. So what do you do?” The knot in her stomach felt worse than any pain on her shoulder.

“Oh… nothing important I just… I…” Her voice trailed off as her mind brought her back to all her failures. The experiments, the King’s son, all of it. The intruder took notice, her smile fading ever so slightly.

“What you just stare at the abyss all day?” She meant it as a joke but from the sigh the monster in the strange coat gave she could tell it wasn’t funny. The smile found its way back to her when she thought of a better question. “Where do you think it leads to?”

She looked up again at the intruder, her face going a little red at the way she looked at her. “W-what?”

“The abyss,” she explained, “where do you think it goes to?” She gulped again. Surely this monster had better things to do then listen to whatever she had to say about a dumb old abyss, she’d just be wasting her time. And yet, why not, it didn’t look like she could talk her way out of it, might as well humor her.

“You know how, that this whole underground is, i-inside a mountain right?”

“Yeah.”

“I-I think th-that the abyss might lead to an exit.” The intruder’s face perked with excitement.

“You mean out of the underground? Besides the exit at Asgore’s castle?”

“Y-yeah! I mean, where does all this water go to? If it were just pouring endlessly, we-we’d all be underwater right?”

“I guess so.” That wouldn’t make a huge difference to her but she kept listening.

“So my guess is, that there’s another way out of the mountain deep in that abyss, the water must pour out to it!”

“Cool! We oughta try that out!”

“W-well I mean, it-it’s not proven, there’s other stuff it could be.”

“Like what?” The intruder sat down on the platform, legs crossed over each other, as she kept listening to her. Funny, they were about the same size when she sat like that, but she sat down with her anyway, adjusting her tail so that it rested in her lap.

“Well, it could also be another wetland like Waterfall is. You know how the waterfall makes everything down here so lush, maybe it’s the same down there.”

“Maybe.” It was a little hard to concentrate when she stared at her like that but she went on.

“And maybe if things start to get a little overpopulated up here, we could invent something to populate the area down there. An elevator like the one’s at the capital, to keep things safe. Only we wouldn’t want to overcrowd the dump or anything, a lot of garbage still gets thrown in here from time to time and it’s fine if there’s no one here but if there’s a huge line for the elevator or something then monsters are gonna get hurt, and they might just complain about the smell and not wanna go down and live there anyway. Yeah, that’s a dumb idea forget that…”

“It’s not dumb.” The intruder smiled at her and she eventually smiled back, forced and nervous, aching a bit due to the fact that she hadn’t smiled herself in a long time, but still a smile. She’d almost forgotten what that felt like.

 

_~~Dear Dr.~~ Hey Alphys,_

_It’s me again. This is my fifth letter this month I guess, you know I lose count with these sorts of things. I just wanted to… I wanted…_

_Do you remember how we met?_

_That day I saw you at the dump and you were looking out in the abyss. I asked you where you thought it led and we spent the next four hours there as you told me every single one of your theories. When we got hungry and I invited you back to my place for some tea? You asked if I had any soda, haha. I didn’t, but I made sure to get some for the next time you came back. I kind of didn’t think you would come back, but you did, the next day, and we had tea again. Well, I had tea you had soda but whatever. You invited me to your place the next day and you introduced me to those human documents. I didn’t think I could like anything from the humans but…_

_Agh, I’m so ADD with these letters. Anyway, when we met, you were talking about all the things you thought the abyss led to, and I stayed with you for as long as you would talk. I wasn’t lying to you, they were all really interesting, but there’s another reason I didn’t want to leave you. When I saw you looking out into that darkness, the way you looked at it, I knew something was up. I knew that you were… you were gonna…_

_I know you still think that way sometimes. I know how you talk about yourself, all those posts you make online that put yourself down, I know you feel like total dirt about yourself and I don’t know why. But I do know that I don’t want you to think that way. I know it’s not that easy, you can’t just tell someone to stop thinking that crap but I really wish you wouldn’t. You’re better than that Alphys, way better. And if you ever did do something like that, if you ever managed to go through with it, I… I’d miss you._

_It’s not just me, plenty other monsters would miss you. Asgore, that friend of yours, all your friends on UnderNet, they’d miss you. And it’s selfish of me to say but as much as they’d miss you, I’d miss you way more. You’re my best friend Alphys, you get me like no one has ever gotten me before. You laugh at my stupid jokes, you don’t think it’s weird that I like anime as much as I do, you don’t run away whenever I get to excited and punch a hole in your lab wall. You get me Alphys, and I know that’s selfish of me to ask but if nothing else, I want you to stay just for me. If something ever happened to you I don’t know what I’d…_

“No this is stupid.” Undyne crumbled up the paper and ripped it to shreds, tossing the remains in the garbage bin. She ran a hand through her hair, tied up in a long ponytail, as she rubbed her thumb and index finger together, sore from all the day’s writing. 

“There’s gotta be a better way to do this.” She said to herself. She knew one better way of doing it but she was too scared to try it. Funny, she wasn’t supposed to be scared of anything, and yet doing that was more terrifying to her than anything else she’d ever faced. But every time she thought of what Alphys might do if she were desperate enough, that one day she could wake up and she would be gone, that she didn’t do enough to help her, it was too much for her. Why was it so difficult! Why couldn’t she just say what she meant to? What was it about this short nerd in a lab coat that affected her so much?

“The smile.” She thought. “That’s probably it.” She pulled out another piece of paper and began writing all the things that comforted her whenever she thought of Alphys.

_Your laugh, your smile, your glasses, how smart you are, the way you’re so passionate about the things you love, the way your tail stands up whenever you get super excited, the cute way you stutter, your sneeze, your smartness, your heart…_

She could go on forever, listing every little detail about her until there was no more paper in the entire world, and still it wouldn’t be enough. Something in her own heart fluttered then, a realization that was a long time coming. A sudden epiphany that her friend Alphys was something much more than a friend to her. That the way she thought of her, the way she wanted to spend almost every minute of the day with her, transcended any feeling she’d ever had about anybody. That she had undoubtedly and unashamedly fallen head over heels for the royal scientist.

“Dammit!” She tore up the paper again, storming straight to her room and into bed. She lay awake for a few hours more, trying her hardest to shake the feelings away but they only came back stronger than ever. 

“Dammit…” She pulled the covers over head as she drifted off to sleep. A smile frozen on her lips.


End file.
